Adrenaline Nights

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 5 Comments

Blood sugar

I am up again in the middle of the night. That makes, I don’t know, twenty or so nights in a row. It’s the hypoglycemia, low blood sugar waking me up for a midnight feeding and sometimes again at four AM. Like having a squalling newborn. The exhaustion in between feedings makes it almost impossible not to pass out immediately, and on those nights I get more sleep. Occasionally adrenaline has done some of the work to raise my blood sugar for me, but then it keeps me up like I had done moonlit espresso shots. Tonight is an adrenaline night. The first few adrenaline nights, when I think about it now, astound me. Each time I had thought I had heard one of my children yelling for me, a loud “MOM”, the kind that accompanies a kid who suddenly realizes he is going to throw up right that second. I would jump out of bed, run to the boy’s room and realize that both of them were one hundred percent sound asleep. It happened once after I knew I was waking up with lows, and I marveled at my brain’s ability to jolt me awake for my own good. Pretty clever, if you ask me, using auditory hallucinations to ensure I didn’t just slip into a coma.

Adrenaline nights wake you up with a jittery, nervous stomach that make anxiety unavoidable. The hours before you are able to sleep again double and redouble the anxiety, and now you suddenly have hours of insomniac time to fill. All by your lonesome. In a spooky, silent and dark house. With access to Google. The first few adrenaline nights were filled with research, scouring reputable medical sites and not so reputable message boards for the answer to the questions, “Why is this happening to me?” and “What can I do to fix this?” Once my bloodshot eyes burned out from the glare of the computer screen, I would refresh them with copious tears the result of other questions, “What if?” and “Why me?” This cycle sometimes lasts four or five hours, before the adrenaline that woke me really leaves me be.

Time can make it better, experience with the adrenaline nights makes it better. I don’t research anymore. I cycle through Facebook, then Pinterest, then Buzzfeed, then Instagram, then the miniature food jewelry pages on Etsy. After those run out it becomes time for an old DVR’d CBS Sunday Morning, My Grandmother’s Ravioli or Treehouse Masters. Absolutely no news, no doom and gloom, no medical jargon, no negativity. It helps.

What also helps is just knowing the moment has come when I am no longer the only one awake in the house. Several times I have been able to fall into a deep peaceful sleep the moment my oldest padded downstairs, said hi and then asked to play on the iPad. Or when my youngest has begun to realize that if he wakes up in the middle of the night I am more likely to be downstairs on the couch than I am in bed, and a few times has snuggled up with me and we’ve both been able to fall back asleep.

I don’t think tonight will work out, though. I have to fast for a blood test, one that might give me answers if only I can stick it out through the night without eating anything before eight in the morning. They asked for ten hours without food, when the longest I have managed in months is six. Adrenaline already woke me up at 12:30, and I have only had two hours of interrupted sleep so far this evening. We will see.

Off The Couch

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 2 Comments

couch

I took a break from writing for a bit because I was worried dwelling on my medical issues would make me go a little crazy-that I would get obsessive or depressed if I focused writing time on them. Well, I was wrong. I forgot that getting thoughts out of my head and onto paper helps me sort through things and then, more importantly, LET THEM GO.

 

I don’t feel well. I feel like throwing up multiple times a day and try my hardest not to throw up, so that my blood sugar doesn’t drop even more than it usually does. I get dizzy out of nowhere and am scared to drive when that happens. My eyesight gets blurry and I can’t read until it clears up. My energy levels are exceedingly low: the other day I couldn’t even manage to pick up my walking pace when I was getting pelted by a cold rainstorm. Most of my days are filled with a very easy task then twice as long resting. Or, I’ve been up in the middle of the night and because of low blood sugar, or dizziness, or nausea have been unable to go back to sleep. Those days are filled with sleep, and nothing more.

It can be depressing. I want my life back. I want the simple things of my life back, like driving to the store to shop without being worried I’ll need to call someone to pick me up if I get sick. I want to get absorbed in a project and miss my feeding time by a half an hour without having my body crash out. I want to be able to problem solve this-I am an excellent detective, normally, and am able through research, soul-searching and data-plotting to figure out the root cause of issues. I want to be able to read when I want. I want to eat a cookie. I want to do something with myself besides passively absorbing food and TV on the couch.

It can make me anxious. I am fairly cautious by nature. I try to be very conscientious about taking care of myself on time, or researching and examining my habits to tweak them for the better. I have become worried that I might pass out somewhere, so that has been the driving force of my decisions for the last few months. As the dizziness increased, so did this fear over the last few weeks. My mission lately has been trying to avoid that.

I won’t get answers until I see an endocrinologist in January, if even then. I feel depressed and anxious that I won’t be able to get my life back until late January at the earliest and there is a possibility that this state is my permanent new normal. The doctor might not be able to tell me much of anything.

Borne of that feeling, I pleaded with their office (after another sleepless night) to see me sooner. The nurse gave me hope for a moment and said I might be able to squeak in an early morning or late afternoon time slot, but that if I really felt that bad I should go to urgent care and have them send paperwork over. I harbored the illusion that if I was a good patient and did what was asked of me, maybe I would be able to see the specialist. That obstacles might be cleared.

I hesitated for a morning, realizing that the urgent care people would not be able to do any tests that would show anything illuminating to the endocrinologist. Then I felt very, very ill again. So ill that I thought, “This might be it, this might finally be the night I spend in the ER with an IV in my arm and triage nurses not knowing what to do with me.” I decided to go after getting the boys from school, packing medications in my purse that I might need in the morning if it came to that.

We went. Everything I did or said, or had done for the last few months or the last few years, got turned around as a way to prove that I was just a crazy hypochondriac. The doctor, this horrible man I wanted to punch in the face, had no intention of listening. He told me with a smirk that I didn’t look sick. He told me that my fibromyalgia is a disease of exclusion only (I told him we had checked out almost everything else) and that it was close to being considered a psychiatric disorder, not a “real” one. He seemed cruelly amused that I took so many supplements, that I self-diagnosed a dairy intolerance. He told me that I needed a doctor to diagnose my hypoglycemia, implying that I was imagining this problem (I did have a doctor diagnose it). When I showed him my records of my blood sugar, the physical proof I had collected to ensure that I would not have a doctor think I was just imagining problems because I was a bored housewife, he chastised me for testing too often, for being far too preoccupied. That I was causing myself an anxiety disorder. I started crying, because I had not come to a doctor to be picked apart, and disbelieved and almost outright mocked. That fueled the fire, because then the discussion became all about how to alleviate depression and anxiety. He smirked when my blood pressure and temp were normal. He made sure I knew where the closest psychiatric ward was, because that’s who could actually help me. He asked if I was suicidal, and condescendingly reassured me that I had “plenty to live for.” I hate this man. I don’t use hate lightly, but I hate this man.

This horrendous waste of my time got me no closer to seeing a real specialist. It made me nervous all over again to talk to any new health professional and exponentially increased my fear of being taken seriously or ever finding out what is actually wrong. The only good to come from it was that I realized, in getting so furiously angry, my symptoms felt a little better. The adrenaline boost from having to physically restrain myself from hurting him, to argue passionately for myself against him, felt better than the passivity I had been using to conserve my energy. I’m using that information about myself today to crawl away from my recent coping methods, since it hasn’t served me well anyways even though I thought it would.

And it helped me clarify for myself that of course I have been anxious, and depressed. He wasn’t wrong to see that in me. But I have every right to feel that way, and that I have a physiological problem that has been life-limiting. I do not have a psychosomatic disorder that is causing physical ailments. And you know what even if I did, screw him. Whatever the cause of my feeling so sick, I did feel incredibly sick and he was cruel to me when I came to him for help.

How big of an asshole is someone is who uses normal emotional responses against a person? How big a dick can a person be to use emotional pain as a reason to dismiss a person’s credibility? How much of a douchebag is someone who decides another person has nothing worthwhile to say, especially when he is in a position of authority over them?

At least, after last night I got my anger back, and a way to get up off the couch.

Tiny Bites

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

big bowl pomegranate

The bowl of little red jewels caught the light, the reward for nearly a half an hour of preparation. Pomegranates require patience. Once scored you can peel back the tough outer layer and begin to use your hands as claws pulling sections apart. Submerging the whole fruit under water, you can delicately loosen the gems from their white pith moorings and let them sink gently to the bottom of the bowl. Some will fall easily without bursting. Some will require finesse, like wiggling a baby tooth loose from pink-red gums. Some arils will split under too much pressure or when they catch the edge of your nail, but there are thousands upon thousands left to pick from. Like fish eggs, we assume so many are created because inevitably so many will be lost along the way. The whole lot is drained though a fine mesh, and the work continues picking out the blemished and the burst, rescuing the ones that need the last bits of white scraped off their bottoms. Then they are ready to eat.

I worried about this Thanksgiving. My body is dysfunctional in that way that means specialist doctors with extensive waitlists, daily confusion as to what healthy can look like for me, the possibility that something is very wrong or that no one will really know what the problem is. Until the cause of that dysfunction is uncovered, most of the canon of holiday food is actively dangerous to me if I lose my inhibitions and eat too much. Candied sweet potatoes and stuffing, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, cocktails and pecan pie are only safe for me in .01 parts per million, like arsenic. Turkey and green beans are acceptable. I worried about how empty and sparse my plate would look. That that emptiness might feel so much like sadness, or grief.

I worried that all the time it takes to make all these things, the hours and hours of peeling and mashing and sautéing would feel like masochism. Like deprivation. Like resentment of the people I love for being able to enjoy these things when I couldn’t. I worried that my love of cooking was purely selfish and greedy, that I was able to indulge my gluttony by it, but didn’t enjoy serving other people no matter how much I care for them.

Worse yet, I worried that my family would be able to see the sadness and selfishness flash across my face. The twin commandments I placed on myself, to be truthful and to be loving, were going to be compromised either one way or another. I didn’t want to lie, nor did I want to pout in envy, and I was quite convinced that at least one would be unavoidable.

As I worked through the process of freeing the pomegranate arils with my oldest son, as I shopped and cooked and cooked and cooked, I was happily surprised that I didn’t feel unhappy at all. The work was as satisfying as it had always been. I felt happy to make, and make, and make without hope of more than a mouthful of each treat. Without the expectation of tangible reward. And I was absolutely relieved to find out that I could be content that my loved ones could have something I couldn’t. The frustration I anticipated in myself dissolved before it materialized.

I had a beautifully happy Thanksgiving, where I got to find out that I still love cooking, I still love my friends and family more than my gluttony, I still can enjoy life with just a taste of this or that, I can be more than my self-pity.

Persephone, the goddess of springtime, spends part of each year as the Queen of the Underworld. We have one month of winter for each pomegranate seed she ate while in the keep of Hades, her kidnapper. As I allowed myself just a few arils out of the thousands we harvested for Thanksgiving, I let the juice burst into my mouth one by one. I was happy with my few, and thought ruefully that four months of winter was more than enough. Too many pomegranate seeds and spring might never come again. But the temptation to have at least a few is too much to pass up altogether, especially when winter, in all its coziness and closeness, is pretty wonderful.

4 pomegranates

Pause

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 2 Comments

pause

Back in August, I had set myself a schedule for writing, that I would complete a 1,500 word essay for the first Wednesday of every month as part of an on-going column. I am going to put that on hold for a little while.

The premise of the column Pain and Joy was that I had learned a lot about all sorts of pain that I’d wanted to share, and that I am learning about joy and want to report on that as well. This month was originally going to be a “pain” installment, specifically “The Pain of Existential Dread”. My original thought was to go into the worry and fear I felt when I was suffering from an unknown illness and detailing how that fear seemed to infect my oldest who was then four. So, five years after this originally happened, I felt like things were under control and I had the distance I needed to tackle this subject. However, five years later I am again in the thick of an unknown illness. I am worried, again, about how severe this new illness might be, about how much my quality of life will be diminished, about how drastic the “cure” will be. I am back in the swamp of not knowing, of waiting ages to see a specialist, and of trying to maintain some psychological buoyancy during the process.

My children (and I bet yours, too) are emotional sponges, and when something is off-kilter they sense it quickly and it colors their world almost immediately. Writing this piece right now feels like the wrong move to make. If I weren’t a parent, delving into my dark fears thoroughly and completely could be cathartic. It would be messy and ugly for a good long while, but it would be over and dealt with. Presenting a polished, articulated version of that fear to the world could open up conversations that I would be able then to discuss and I would not feel as alone. If I weren’t a parent.

I am a parent. There is the reality that if I dig deep into the dark places in my mind that it might be hard to climb back out-certainly not quickly enough to be present, completely present, for my children when they need me. What I learned the first time out with an unknown illness and the prospect of a scary diagnosis is that tears and anger are frightening to my kids, but that emotional distance is even scarier. I cannot be so absorbed in writing this right now, and risk that distance.

Also, immersing myself in this story means that for a while no other stories are being told-not the one about how the squirrels always try to eat the face off our pumpkins, not the one about my youngest child’s very first goal, not the one about how we spent all weekend as a family playing Risk, not the one about how our Christmas lists are coming along. The dominant story of “What will happen to me?” would be the one I would get trapped in, and if I’m trapped there, all of us eventually are trapped there. That isn’t really fair.

So, I have decided to pause the column, for now. I may write the next “Joy” installment. I may not. I might write short frothy pieces for a bit, or short cranky pieces. I may just journal. This illness is making life less predictable than I imagined, so I am going to give myself the grace and wiggle room to ignore self-imposed deadlines and goalposts. I am giving myself the luxury to write what and when and where and how I see fit for a while. That, I think, is something healthy I can do for myself and my family now that my health is suddenly, again, up for grabs.

Mothers Always Write

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

MAW

Hi everyone!

I have an essay published on Mothers Always Write today called “Muffled”.  It is about my younger son and his struggles with speech delays and with not being able to hear well when he was three.  I would absolutely love for you to visit their website at

http://mothersalwayswrite.com/muffled/

They have many wonderful essays and poems through all the years of being a mom.

Thanks!

Kristin

I’m Fine

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

I'm fine

My oldest had a rough day at school last year. He ended up throwing up in a bathroom and was weaving around the hallways when a teacher who knew him noticed he looked green. She guided him to the nurse’s office and asked him how he was feeling.

He replied, “I’m fine,” in a nonchalant and off-handed manner. The teacher was stunned and amused, because he obviously was not fine. When she later told me the story of how this had all played out she felt so bad for him, but also thought it was endearingly funny. I did, too.

My youngest has a swollen cheek right now, and we think it’s from a six-year molar coming in and there being a little infected gum tissue. Yesterday he told me his jaw hurt, and when I asked if it still did today he said, “No.” I asked him if he was sure and his answer was, “If I distract myself it doesn’t hurt. As long as I don’t think about it.”

A bit exasperated I pressed further, “If you think about it, how does it feel?”

“It hurts.”

“So it does hurt?”

“Sure, it does. But not if I’m distracted.”

I think this is the legacy of having a parent with a chronic illness.

The boys have seen me throw up suddenly and move on with my day. They’ve known times when I was having trouble walking but still stayed with them at the park after school. They know that a lot of the time I don’t feel great, but I cope as well as I can. They say to listen to your body, and I absolutely do, but I have the added dimension that sometimes my body is a straight-up liar. It sends unnecessary pain signals all the time, it tells me I need a nap when really I need to exercise, it tells me I need tons of sugar when that will make me crash harder. So I ignore it. I power through. I tough it out.

The boys have started to do the same. We use the phrase, “It’s not the end of the world,” a lot in our household, that and, “It could always be worse.” We’ve gotten philosophical about pain and illness around here. I think our collective pain tolerance has gone up, unintentionally, and recalibrated. My oldest started out as a toddler who screamed bloody murder at the smallest scrape, and now throws up and claims, “I’m fine.”

But, surprisingly, now my boys also trust me when I tell them that they should probably stay home from school, or see a doctor, or get a flu shot. They used to try to tough everything out, going to soccer practice with a fever or pushing and crying for a playdate when they had been up coughing all night. They don’t do that anymore. It doesn’t seem heroic, it seems like suffering unnecessarily. Maybe they’re just older and wiser. Or maybe it’s because of what they see.

They see me nap, and rest, and exercise, and check my blood sugar, and prepare healthy food. Taking care of yourself when you are really too sick to power through is absolutely normalized. This is life, this is what people do. We push on when life isn’t that bad, when “it could be a lot worse”. When it gets worse we stop and rest and give our bodies a chance to catch up.

Since I have been having such a dysfunctional time of it with my body, I worried that the boys were going to end up with a dysfunctional relationship with their mostly healthy bodies. One day they will be the only ones monitoring the state of their health or illness. They should be off on their own some time ten or fifteen years from now, without a mom to check up on how they really feel. Luckily, I think we are inching towards balance, and I think that is because they have a sick parent, not in spite of it.

The Joy of New Clothes

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

 

New Clothes

“Nicholas just opens his drawer and takes whatever shirt!” Christopher is incredulous that his older brother, the one he looks up to, the one who was his first hero and the first person who was able to make him laugh, would be so cavalier about what he would wear.

Nicholas truly does not care much about clothing; his daily uniform of t-shirts and track pants changes only on special occasions, when we might be able to get him into jeans and a sweater. Even when he asserted his independence as a toddler, he truly didn’t fight us in the arena of “what to wear”, even though he was a fierce competitor in every other way. So, as he grew through to the eight-year-old he is today, we decided to take advantage of his not really caring all that much. When we go clothes shopping we have a plan that involves multiples of the basketball shorts, track pants and t-shirts he likes to wear. We hit one store for about an hour and a half every six months. Done and done.

Christopher gets these hand-me-downs, an extensive collection of not really well-thought-out, functional but not fashionable, interchangeable clothes. For a while he seemed to feel okay about them, as they were comfortable and usually were decorated with cartoon characters he liked. Then it wasn’t okay. Then came the showdown.

It was before a gymnastics class in the dead of winter. With polar vortexes and sub-zero temperatures, we would layer up like crazy before heading out somewhere. That particular day he had on thick socks, boots, long track pants, a long-sleeved t-shirt, a hoodie, a double-layered overcoat, a hat, a pair of gloves and a scarf.

Once inside the too-warm gym, (an environment well suited to keeping muscles from cramping and keeping little girls in leotards from getting a chill, but horrible for wearing sweatshirts) he took off his jacket and gloves but would not take off his hoodie. The flow of our morning stalled, and I was not thrilled about the ramifications of his refusal. Christopher can be incredibly stubborn, and we had been having a long winter of uneasy truces. I was picking this battle, and would see it through.

He crossed his arms and just stopped. I began by joking, “Christopher, you need to take your hoodie off, you silly goose, or you’ll roast to death during class!”

A grunt.

“Christopher, you are going to feel too hot and get too sweaty.”

Another grunt.

“Christopher Wagner, you are not going in there with that sweatshirt on, I am not going to let you.”

An anguished growl half under his breath.

“That is it! I have had enough! Why in the world won’t you take off your sweatshirt-you do every other class, every other time, what is going on with you today? And we’re not going to just stand to the side the entire class. You have one more minute to take that off or we are going home, young man!”

Tears.

“Are you taking off that sweatshirt?”

“NO!” He finally answered me in a yell. I grabbed his jacket and started feeding his arms through the sleeves, and silently sat at his feet shoving feet into boots. With a tense, almost whispered, “Get up,” from me, he got up. I zipped him, grabbed his hand and went out the doors. He didn’t protest leaving, and he tends not to. Christopher is fatalistic and grim when he accepts his fate, when he decides that he would rather accept the consequences of his stubbornness than acquiesce. I will say this for him, he has some sort of internal integrity that will not allow him to buckle under threat of missed classes, or no dessert, or zero screen time unless he knows he’s being ridiculous. When he sticks to his guns, I know it is very important to him. Once we got back to the car, I kept quiet and used the silence to cool off and hear myself think. After a few minutes, I ask him more gently, “Why, child, why? What was that all about?”

Finally unclenching he gave me an answer, “I don’t like football.”

What football had to do with anything I could not figure out. Then I realized that in a rush I had grabbed clothes for him that morning. We had little time to quibble about what he might or might not want to wear, so I ran upstairs, grabbed his brown track pants and the only brown shirt that went with them. The brown shirt had orange cleats on it and proudly proclaimed just one word in all caps “FOOTBALL”. And apparently my youngest does not like football.

And apparently he is very, very tired of misrepresenting who he is and what he likes. Because his options are limited to what his older brother liked just well enough to shove into a shopping cart two years ago, Christopher has had to lie about who he was. Our clothes communicate for us, and Christopher couldn’t take this miscommunication any more.

My husband, Greg, was the third of four boys and said, “Yeah, hand-me-downs save a lot of money, but it does stink. I never had new clothes, except for family pictures when Mom wanted us all to match. Let’s take him shopping, let him pick out things for himself.”

I introduced the idea to Christopher, and he was smiled and covered his mouth with his hand and then squeaked out, “Really?”

“Really.”

As we all stepped through the doors of a department store, Greg suddenly remembered, “Oh wait, guys. I need to get a couple of new dress shirts, can we head over there first? Then we’ll go to the kids section?” He looked to Christopher for the okay. Christopher nodded in agreement. The boys and I wandered around racks of leather belts and blazers while Greg held up a windowpane patterned shirt and asked, “Is this too much? Should I get it in a different color? Or the same color but a different pattern?”

Christopher found the tie rack and his eyes widened. He touched the vibrantly colored ties gently and showed me a swirl of color here or polka dot pattern there. Greg’s attempts to pick a shirt were interrupted with, “Daddy, you should get this one!” and “Daddy, you should get that one!” Christopher wanted so much that someone, someone he knew, would get to wear these beautiful, soft pieces of fabric he couldn’t contain himself. When Greg politely skirted the idea of buying ties one too many times, Christopher sighed quietly, “I wish I could use my money to have this.”

Wasn’t that why we were here in the first place? To get for Christopher clothing that he loved, that he wanted, that he felt wonderful in? I bit my lip trying not to smile too broadly and scare him away and said, “Sweetie, do you know that they make ties for little kids? And dress shirts, too? Do you want to go look for those?”

There have only been a handful of times in Christopher’s life that I have seen his face light up the way it did in the midst of the menswear section that day. A new possibility flashed into his consciousness that had seemed remote and unattainable before, and now he was told that not only did these clothes exist, but that he could get them for himself right then. There would be no waiting to see if a better coupon came in next week, no declaration that he probably didn’t need any more clothes because he had enough. I took his hand and guided him to the boys section of clothing, wooshing past the hoodies and track pants and athletic-themed t-shirts and right to the dress clothes put out for Easter. “Here we are!” I declared triumphantly and here we were.

We loaded our arms with multiple colors of dress shirts, a bouquet of clip-on ties and a couple of pairs of slacks and marched right over to the dressing room. I felt nervously excited as I helped button him up, as I tucked his shirt into his pants and clipped on his tie. He stepped back for a moment, looked himself over top to bottom and smiled, a huge, broad, unbelievable smile. He was amazed with himself, with the transformation he had gone through in the space of a minute. He pouted his lips and grabbed the knot of the tie with one hand, the length with his other and straightened it saying, “Men do this.” I covered my mouth with my hands and let my eyes keep smiling at him, “Yes they do, they do that.” A moment later he straightened his shoulders and said proudly, “I look like a scientist.” I suppressed a little laugh because I didn’t want him for a second to believe I was laughing at him, but my heart was jumping out of my chest. I had not realized that he had been quietly studying the clothing of the grown men around him, admiring how they held themselves and what their clothes represented. I hadn’t realized how completely happy he would be to wear that himself.

We left that day with white undershirts, three dress shirts in light blue, burgundy and white, five different ties, a pair of black slacks and a Lego watch, because his new mature look would have been incomplete without a watch. We left the store with a very, very happy five-year-old.

Houswifery and Rage Against the Machine

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

housewifery

I have tried to like housework.

I really have. I have quotes scribbled into my notebooks about the Zen nature of caring for the objects that serve you well. One reminds me that caring for pots and pans we use or combing our tangled hair, is an act of self-care and should be done carefully. Another is a conversation on how to reach enlightenment, where the student asks the teacher how to do so, and the teacher replies, “Chop wood, carry water”. The student then asks what one does after enlightenment and the teacher replies, “Chop wood, carry water.” The act of cleaning, scrubbing, folding and putting away can be meditative.

I have more quotes scattered around the house and Pinterest boards about how women authors balanced housekeeping and writing. (This is not a question many male authors have had put to them, nor have many commented on it spontaneously) Agatha Christie found herself plotting novels while doing dishes. I think about the episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon takes a menial job to free his brain for a creative breakthrough.

I own books called The Hoarder in You, Love the Home You Have, and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

I have bribed myself with clothing, and lunches out of the house, and new books to try to goad myself into the domestic duties are mine to tackle.

My husband is a neat and tidy person, an equal partner in shopping and cleaning and childcare when he is home. But four out of seven days he is not, and the entirety of our house’s functionality rests on me.

The only way I have found to prod myself to do the right thing, when all these other things fail, is The Housekeeping Playlist.

The Playlist is raucous.

I yell along to it instead of singing.

Head-banging and fists pumping in the air might be involved.

And it consists almost entirely of Rage Against the Machine songs.

People of the Sun. Bulls on Parade. Renegades of Funk. Guerilla Radio. Testify.

Sleep Now in the Fire.

Once I get a good dose of “F*ck the system” out of my system I am ready to tackle dirty dishes and wiping down stainless steel appliances. Maybe it’s my way of announcing to myself that it’s okay that I feel pissy and whiny and don’t want to be stuck doing this. Maybe it’s the deep down irony of yelling at the patriarchy and then looking like a stereotypical housewife perpetuating the system. Maybe it’s a way for me to remember that me not wanting to clean is a ridiculously small and petty thing, compared to what bigger injustices are going on in the world. Or maybe I just need a beat and some passion in my day.

We watched American Hustle last year, and there is a scene where Jennifer Lawrence is smashing around the house to “Live and Let Die”, yellow rubber gloves on, vacuum nearby and ready to go. I yelled out, “That’s me!” as my husband started laughing his ass off gasping, “That’s you.”

I really tried to like housework. I did. Once in a while, you’ll still see me staring off contemplatively while I wipe down a counter. Or peacefully sweeping up. Or on my hands and knees humming while I scrub like Cinderella. But, if it looks like I’m having some sort of seizure through the kitchen window, the playlist is most likely why. And the house might just end up spotless.

I Overdid It

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Overdid it

I overdid it.

I was suddenly gifted six hours a day where child-care wasn’t my primary objective. For the first time in nearly nine years, I was responsible for the well-being and care of my offspring for only eight hours of the fourteen they are awake each day.

Or, as someone else might reference it, both my kids are in full-day school.

I absolutely did not want to squander this opportunity to do everything, everything, I have been meaning to get done for the last nine years. And apparently I thought that all should be accomplished within the first three weeks of the very first school year that this free time has appeared.

Goals, dreams, accomplishments: I would soon have them all within my grasp!

  • Showering every day-Check.
  • Exercising every day-Check.
  • Writing every day-Check.
  • Taking care of e-mails and phone calls in a timely manner-Check
  • Putting things away so that our house looked less like a clutter-bomb exploded-Check
  • Making a healthy breakfast, lunch and dinner-Check.

They were good goals, attainable goals. But then I got greedy for more: more polish, more perfection, more poise. I have all this time now, don’t I? Shouldn’t I be capable of all these things and more? What, with all this free time and what-not. So I began adding to the to-do list, the accomplishments I needed to have under my belt by pick-up time.

  • Showering every day AND drying my hair AND shaving my legs AND moisturizing AND putting on make-up AND putting on a flattering outfit.
  • Exercising every day-but in order to count it has to be new and challenging and has to keep my muscles guessing and be intense and must lead towards the goal of becoming ATHLETIC.
  • Writing every day. Writing blog pieces and long pieces and cover letters and author biographies. Submitting to as many publications as I could. Researching and reading the archives of every respectable magazine I can get my hands on.
  • Taking care of e-mails and phone calls that both include current issues and issues one, two, three months out.
  • Putting things away, scrubbing all the floors, dusting every room, washing all the sheets and the pillows, going through the closets, cleaning out the car.
  • Making healthy breakfast, lunches and dinners, snacks and treats AND making the outrageous claim that I would try to make sure we never had fast food on a soccer night (which, by the way, is four out of five weekdays).

I bought blush for the first time since my wedding eleven years ago. I doubled my exercise sessions and tripled the steps I take in a day. I decided I should make the one free weekday afternoon I have with the boys a cookie-baking day, just because my youngest loves baking and we never do it and WHY NOT, I’VE GOT ALL THIS TIME TO MYSELF NOW!

And I am burned-out.

I forgot that I still take care of the boys at least eight other hours a day. I forgot that my husband still travels for work almost every week. I forgot that I have multiple chronic illnesses (hypothyroidism, fibromyalgia and hypoglycemia) that I have to carefully manage. I forgot that I was human. That I might have a bad night’s sleep, or a disappointing setback, or a moment where my body has just given up on me, or a minor argument, or even a just a pimple.

I seemed to think that this extra time to myself was a magic wand. If I coupled it with diligence and effort and not being afraid of planning and experimenting and rolling up my sleeves, I would be unstoppable.

Yep. Except for writing this, today I am pretty well and fully stopped. It’s a high pain day, and my hands and feet are cramped and curled up on themselves unless I push them flat. My head is pounding and my shoulders won’t un-hunch. My body likes to remind me when I’m being a bit foolish and unrealistic.

My body likes to tell me when I am being too hard on myself.

So, I’m going to try to find a few of those six hours today to rest, and regroup, and take a deep breath. Why not? I have all this time to myself now.